Mobile wireless communications devices, such as “smart” cellular phones and personal digital assistants (PDA's) have become pervasive in today's world for a multitude of reasons beyond the convenience of wireless voice communications. Many such mobile wireless communications devices have relatively large screens, full keyboards, and are capable of connecting to the Internet. A popular function provided by some Internet capable mobile wireless communications devices is that of providing a user with wireless access to his e-mail account or accounts. Some mobile wireless communications devices may even, at a user's request, initiate a search of the user's e-mail account for a search term or a set thereof.
There a multitude of ways in which a mobile wireless communications device can provide a user with e-mail access. For example, the device may be used to visit a web page granting e-mail access. Alternatively, the device may poll an e-mail server at regular intervals for new e-mail messages. Unfortunately, both of these methods of e-mail access have drawbacks.
For example, to access an e-mail account via a web page, the entire web page is typically loaded. This represents significantly more information to be transmitted over the network than that contained in the e-mail messages to be read. Further, e-mail access in this fashion does not provide a user with an indication that he has received a new e-mail message unless he proactively uses the mobile wireless communications device to visit the e-mail web page.
Polling an e-mail server at regular intervals for new e-mail messages allows a user to receive a somewhat timely indication that he has received a new e-mail message. However, to conserve bandwidth, the polling interval cannot be too short. Yet, setting the polling interval to a greater period of time may mean that the user will not receive an indication that he has received a new e-mail message in a timely fashion.
A further drawback is that an e-mail message is downloaded once. If metadata about an e-mail message changes (i.e. its status as having been read) on the server, yet that e-mail message has been previously downloaded to the mobile wireless communications device, the metadata of the copy of the e-mail message on the device will not be updated to reflect the change. Thus, a user's e-mail inbox on his phone may not be consistent with his e-mail inbox on the e-mail server when using an e-mail polling method to link a mobile wireless communications device with an e-mail account.
As explained above, a mobile wireless communications device may initiate a search of a user's e-mail account on an e-mail server for a search term or term, and may provide the search results to a user. However, the display of the search results contains similar drawbacks as that of e-mail messages. The mobile wireless communications device may initiate a search, and the server may send the search results thereto. The user may, however, not access those search results until a later point in time, or may repeatedly access those search results over a period of time. If metadata about an e-mail message contained in the search results changes on the server, yet those search results were already communicated to the mobile wireless communications device, the metadata of the e-mail message in the search results will disadvantageously not be updated to reflect the change.
As such, new methods of aggregating e-mail messages and search results from an e-mail server to a mobile wireless communications device are useful.